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BusinessWeek: July 12, 1993 |
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Books
UNVEILING THE EVIL EMPIRE'S UGLY SECRETS LENIN'S TOMB: THE LAST DAYS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE By David Remnick Random House x 576pp x $25 If ever there were a topic ripe for definitive treatment in a book, it is the profound and swift collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Journalists in the Soviet Union at the time scored impressive scoops. But events have moved too fast for book authors, since publishers need nearly a year to get a work into print. Most books issued so far have been outdated long before release. Until now. David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb is a brilliant effort--a delightful read, full of pathos and humor, woven of keen reporting and a deep understanding of Russian and Soviet culture. Remnick, a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post from 1988 to 1991, sidesteps the problem of chronicling a country in constant flux by focusing instead on why the mighty Soviet monolith fluttered away like a stack of cards. His answer: The empire could not survive once the evils of communist rule were known and absorbed. True, many brave Russian writers and activists, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Andrei Sakharov, had long struggled to expose the horrors of Stalinism and other atrocities. But not until a clever communist apparatchik, Mikhail Gorbachev, unleashed glasnost in 1987 could the full weight of that history be felt. The result was hardly what Gorbachev intended. Once out of the bottle, the truth genie brought the demise not only of Gorbachev but also of the communist state he wanted to modernize. Remnick writes: "Whether he relished the task or not, Gorbachev was acting as the keeper of the secrets, the chief curator of the Party's criminal history." Criminal indeed. Remnick, a skillful writer, uses chilling flourishes to convey the horrors of Stalin's terror. In a desolate primary school he visits, for example, he finds odd drains in the floor. Their purpose: to wash away blood after nighttime executions of political prisoners by secret police. This macabre travelogue continues with a visit to Kolyma, in the Russian Far East, where political prisoners arrived by ship and were marched barefoot across the ice to labor camps where most died. At another spot, the wall of an execution chamber holds a tiny door. To prevent doomed prisoners from becoming hysterical, the door was used to shoot them from behind, during what seemed routine interrogations, Remnick explains. The point is not just the horror but its sheer scale. As Remnick relates, tens, if not scores, of millions have died since the Bolshevik Revolution. Think of the gulags: From 1935, when Joseph Stalin's great purges began, to January, 1953, just before Stalin's death, nearly 20 million people were arrested, and at least 7 million were killed in prison. Add to that several million who perished earlier, during forced farm collectivization and intentional starvation, and the 22 million soldiers and civilians who died in World War II. These numbers are not news, but Remnick's interviews with historians and survivors give them meaning. Public response to such monumental evil, Remnick asserts, fueled the country's breakup even more than the failing economy. A fascinating aspect of the book is its exploration of the conservatives' backlash against the trashing of the country and ideology they believe in. Remnick scorns right-wing chauvinists, including ultranationalist racists and the boozy, inept leaders of the abortive 1991 coup. To his credit, though, he doesn't exaggerate the threat from the far right. And he's evenhanded in his treatment of such conservatives as Nina Andreyeva, the grandmotherly Leningrad chemistry teacher who in 1988 wrote a notorious defense of Stalinism. In a memorable scene, Andreyeva, in her cozy apartment, staunchly defends her views while slaving over lunch for Remnick. Right-wingers, he writes, tend to be excellent cooks. Remnick's heroes are people, famous or obscure, who forced Russia to face its past. Chief among them are Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shervardnadze, top Gorbachev deputies who fearlessly pushed honest assessments of communism. Russian President Boris Yeltsin is also presented favorably by Remnick, who forgives his boorish shortcomings and praises his valor during the coup. The biggest hero, though, is the late Andrei Sakharov, the H-bomb scientist turned human-rights activist who epitomized the Russian people's spirituality and bravery. After Gorbachev freed him from internal exile in 1986 as a political tactic, much of the population seized upon Sakharov as its guiding light. In fact, the book's high point is the acrid interplay between the two at a Soviet Parliament session, when they clashed over limiting the Communist Party's power. The last Soviet leader, for all his glory, is shown up as a petty careerist unwilling to face the inevitable, while Sakharov, unyielding, "represented the hard and inescapable truth." Remnick's excellent work might have given more weight to the declining economy as a factor in the Soviet collapse. But in the end, his analysis hits a bull's eye: The Russian people's respect for truth toppled what was arguably the bloodiest political regime of this century. | |
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